Summer 2017 CD releases from Clean Feed and Rogue Art

Wild Red Yellow by Larry Ochs Sax & Drumming Core

From the Paris label Rogue Art comes the July, 2017 release of a recording I have always loved, despite the fact that it took me 3 years to mix, edit, and ready a master. The nature of the two longest tracks on Wild  Red  Yellow demanded the use of three drummers instead of the two heard in all earlier recordings and concerts by  the Sax $& Drumming Core. Those pieces needed "percussion" rather than a second drum kit in many places on those two tracks, so this CD sees William Winant and Matthias Bossi joining  Scott Amendola, with Ochs, Fujii, and Tamura riding their waves of sound. Those two tracks are dedicated to film-makers and composed in a similar form to the pieces on the later Fictive Five CD, which would not have been as good had this Rogue Art  recording not preceded it into the studio. Recorded in 2010 (!), it took me and master engineer Phil Perkins years to mix, due to all the percussive sound-elements involved, our need to be able to hear the mix in several different iterations before deciding on final balances, and the many choices of how to order our musical "scenes" within each piece. High-end listening devices anda fresh mind going in recommended. As Brian Morton says in the liner notes: This music doesn’t take time; it creates time and suspends our usual functional attitude to it.  

More About the CD on Ochs’ Bandcamp site (https://larryochs.bandcamp.com/album/wild-red-yellow)

Saxophone Special Revisited,  featuring Rova, Henry Kaiser and Kyle Bruckmann, released in May, 2017 on Clean Feed. Steve Lacy’s mid-1970s innovations helped shape improvised music for decades.  His 1974 live recording Saxophone Special lit up the ears of the soon-to-be Rovas and sparked our imaginations during the band’s earliest days. To reflect the classic sextet of the original Lacy project, which included two late masters of improvisation: Derek Bailey on electric guitar and Micheal Waisvisz on synthesizer, Rova are here joined by the guitar of their colleague of the past 40 years, Henry Kaiser; as well as Bay Area analog-synth ace Kyle Bruckmann. This celebration and reinvestigation of Saxophone Special newly illuminates the revolutionary compositional and improvisational ideas put to practice by Steve Lacy in the early Seventies. That was a time when the saxophone quartet was an unknown format for improvisation – Anthony Braxton’s “New York, Fall 1974” was released only a few months before, and the World Saxophone Quartet was to appear a year later. Like Electric Ascension, this tribute points to the undiscovered future, as well as expressing gratitude to the original 6 masters of music on the Lacy original. This recording is also the renewal of the collaboration between Rova and Kaiser which resulted in many early LP gems of creative music: "As Was", "Cinema Rovaté", and "The Removal of Secrecy.

Buy CD at http://www.rova.org